The Role of Public Health Leadership in Crisis Management: Evaluating Administrative Responses to Health Emergencies and strategies development

Abstract

Background: Leadership in public health endeavours is crucial since the component of health emergencies needs administrative attention coupled with proper planning in order to minimize the effects posed to populations. Now, the main drives for public health leaders and the tactics to be used are ubiquitous, diverse, and sometimes inconsistent with short-term and long-term goals. Objective: It is a critical evaluation of the leadership of public health in crisis particularly identifying and analysing the administrative actions together with the formulation of leadership strategies for the improvement of administrative responses to health crises. Methodology: According to PRISMA, this study involves a systematic literature review of articles that were published between 2010 & 2023 in PubMed, Scopus, & Google Scholar. Specifically, inclusion criteria concerned studies exploring public health administrative roles and strategic planning in health emergencies, including leadership and decision-making, and health policies. Of the 200 identified papers, 120 met the inclusion criteria focused on leadership in health emergencies, while 80 were excluded for reasons including lack of focus on leadership (20), non-English publication (40), and grey literature (20). From the included studies, 13 high-relevance articles were analyzed qualitatively, assessing their methodological quality and the applicability of leadership solutions to various crises, revealing patterns in leadership effectiveness and strategic development for crisis management. Results: Effective public health leadership helps improve disaster response by fostering communication, collaboration, and informed decision making as the study finds. Proactive risk identification, along with stakeholder communication and resource management were central to these strategies. Nevertheless, difficulties including inflexible organizational structures and lack of consistency in a coordinated crisis management plan were mentioned. Conclusion: It concludes that leadership in health crises can be effective only if public health leaders collaborate with evidence to build flexible and efficient response strategies. Greater attention on adaptive measures and collaboration between sectors can operationalise and strengthen preparedness and lessen consequences during health threats. More future research should be focused on examining how some leadership models influence crisis response results.